DescriptionLaura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series is a fictionalized account of Wilder’s childhood growing up in a family settling the American frontier in the late nineteenthcentury. As much as the series is about childhood and the idyllic space of the blank, uncultivated frontier, it is about a girl growing into a woman, replacing childhood play and dreams with an occupation, sense of meaning, and location as an adult, woman, citizen, and artist. In this essay, I explore the depictions of play in the series as their various iterations show Laura’s departure from childhood and mirror the cultivation and development of the frontier itself. In my reading, I locate four distinct elements of play to answer these questions: Laura’s interactions and negotiations with various doll figures; her use of play as a tool to explore and bend boundaries and gender prescriptions; play as an industrious act intermingled with work; and her play with words, which allows her to transition out of childhood into a meaningful role as artist, playing an important role in the mythologizing and narration of the American frontier story.